I think it's an excellent time to buy into Pentax.

There's a horde of great new lenses available, the lack of which has been the bane of the brand for years.

The K10D is available new for a steal for a short time more.

There are the K200D and K20D that have just come on to the market.

And there are second hand and refurb K100Ds around, to be had for next to nothing. All of them can use all the lenses.

In other words, more choice, more value, higher specs than at any time since Pentax first made a digital SLR.

By the time you've grown into the K10D, it won't be worth much second hand, granted. But if you're already worried about this, when you describe yourself as a beginner, then perhaps this isn't the road you should be going down.

I think it depends entirely on whether you're the type of person to get intimidated by technology.

If you're not, put the camera into aperture priority mode, and just use that for a while. Do lots of reading, thinking, experimenting, and use the other features as and when you feel the need and/or the inclination.

If you're a beginner to photography using an SLR, it will take a while to grow into the K10D without a doubt - it's not really a point-and-shoot camera, even in fully auto mode. If you leave everything automatic, it tends to bias its choices towards natural colours and contrast, which can look a little flat compared with the over-bright, over-contrasty, over-sharpened results produced by some of the more consumer-oriented cameras.

At the very least, you should expect to be doing some simple editing, even if you use a very basic tool such as Picasa.

No worries

If you're anything at all like most of the people here, you'll make lots of use of them

What's your budget? I'm getting the impression that you're somewhere between 'completely skint' and 'loaded'... so I'd be inclined to get the Mark 2 18-55 and the Pentax DA 55-300.

If I've read you wrong, and this would stretch your budget too far, I'd get the 50-200 instead of the 55-300.

And if even that's too much, you won't go wrong just with the 18-55, and second hand lenses when you're much more used to it all.

For the price, it's better than Ok. I've used one briefly, and seen some results from it - the only drawback I've seen is, as people have mentioned, the purple fringing it shows in high contrast situations. But lots of lenses show this to varying extents.

You might. It all depends on your budget.

As people say, the 50-200 is very good, light and inexpensive.

Moving up in price a bit, the 18-55 and newly released 55-300 would cover the whole of the focal length range from 18-300, and you'd still only need two lenses.

Or alternatively you could spend some time getting used to the camera with just the 18-55, and then look for others second hand, which is what I did.

None of these is a bad lens. The only risk is that you'll end up spending a little more if you get them singly rather than as part of the initial kit.

One little request: for posting huge URLs, either use www.tinyurl.com to shorten them, or embed links in text like this. That way, the link doesn't end up forcing the browser to be too wide for the screen, making everyone scroll left and right to read all the posts on the thread.

Thanks, and good luck.

In the context of Hyram's question about the Slik AF2100 ball head for his tripod, it occurs to me that many of us will have bought some accessory or other that has turned out to be far better than we expected.

In my case, the ball head has been fantastic, and at the other end of the spectrum, the best £9 I've spent on camera gear was for the wrist strap I've burbled on about once or twice.

They have in common the fact that the usefulness has been out of all proportion to the expectation.

What have you guys bought that's turned out to be unexpectedly useful?

... that the sheep had a go at. That's why they're penned up, so they don't get the cake too.

Here's an example. This is the whole frame, taken with a lens I recently bought, resized so that it fits nicely in the browser.




Here's a 100% crop of part of it:

The term '100% crop' is a bit misleading, and it was a while before I realised what people were on about too.

It actually means 'a crop, where 100% of the original pixels are shown'.

If you consider the K10D frame, it's 3872 pixels wide and 2592 pixels high, which is way too big to show in a browser. So the original needs resizing - to 800 pixels wide, for instance, for the weekly competition here.

So inevitably, pixels are lost in the process.

This has a number of consequences, one of which is that it's almost impossible to tell anything meaningful about the sharpness, or the noisiness of the original image.

So what people tend to do, in order to show these meaningfully on a web page, is crop out just part of the image, so that it displays at its full resolution on the page.

So you get to see 100% of the pixels from that part of the image.

Hope that helps!

It all depends on how 'creative' you're intending to be.

Many years ago in my film days I did a couple of weddings for friends. Nothing fancy, just the standard groups and a few nice poses of the couple and close family.

I knew a lot less than I do now (which still isn't much).

However, they all turned out fine (I was very proud of the results, AAMOF, especially considering how terrified I was at the outset), and one of the single biggest contributors to the fact that they looked like proper wedding photos rather than snaps taken by a guest was simply down to the following fact:

If you're the official guy, no one gets in the way, and they look at you not someone else. Of if they're looking at each other, you get them as you want them, not at the funny angle that's inevitable if you're there as a spectator.

Thanks!!

Returning to my original question, I notice that the item in question has been bid up to very nearly the new price from Microglobe already, so it's completely moot.

However, you guys have thrown me into complete confusion over which one to get, but I do appreciate the suggestions